


But Except in Dreams You're Never Really Free

by thereweregiants



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Amnesia, Hurt/Comfort of a sort I suppose, M/M, Post-Fall of Overwatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:28:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23519974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereweregiants/pseuds/thereweregiants
Summary: What makes a person who they are?Is it their experiences, or the personality they're born with?What makes you - you?Jesse McCree would really like to know, because he has an amnesiac Soldier 76 on his hands and doesn't have the faintest fucking idea what to do with him.
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Soldier: 76 | Jack Morrison
Comments: 36
Kudos: 117





	But Except in Dreams You're Never Really Free

**Author's Note:**

> do I really ship something until I do memory fuckery/alternate timelines/shoving my sticky fingers once more into nature vs. nurture?   
> survey says no
> 
> title from Warren Zevon's [Desperados Under the Eaves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NFDgl8TnUE)  
> written to a lot of Rhiannon Giddens

The pool of blood is so large that at first Jesse doesn’t give the body lying in it a second look. Something about what the person is wearing sticks in his brain, though - red, white and blue, oddly garish for someone fighting in the shadows - and he turns back around. 

He rolls the body over, and once it’s out of the shadows he can see who it is. Soldier 76. Of course. Jesse stays there a minute, knees starting to protest his crouch as he stares down at the shattered visor and bashed in skull of the man who was once Jack Morrison. What a fucking way to go. 

Jesse leans over to search the body - not as crass as it sounds, he swears: he figures he can hand over anything important he finds to Ana - when there’s a cracked-sounding moan. Jesse sits back on his haunches in surprise. The blood-splashed piece of concrete that caved Jack’s head in is the size of a turret, large enough that Jesse would have a hard time getting his arms around it, let alone lifting it. There’s no way he could have survived that, right?

There’s a thick flap of skin peeled down from above Jack’s temple, large enough that it covers his eye. Jesse flips it back, glad he’s wearing gloves, and brushes away the shattered red composite from where it’s dusting the top of Jack’s face. The bottom half is covering his nose and mouth still, but Jesse can see the slight movement of his chest. 

Fuck.

He wants to leave him there - he has no particular love for Jack fucking Morrison, and he’s pretty sure he saw brain matter a second ago but - 

But. 

Jesse can feel decades worth of history pressing down on him and feels the urge to light a match to clear the air. Instead he stands, slings Jack’s ridiculously large rifle over his shoulder, and cracks his back. He’s too old for this shit, Jesse grumbles to himself, aware of the irony as he scoops up a man nearly twenty years his senior in a bridal carry. 

He braces Jack against a wall for a moment, fumbles at the other man’s belt until he comes up with a grenade. One satisfying cover explosion later, Jesse’s stealing away through back alleys, starting a long and circuitous route to his current bolthole.

-x-x-x-x-x-

“You’re lucky that this place was stocked up,” Jesse tells his unconscious companion. The small Blackwatch-stocked apartment in Montréal had been abandoned years ago when the city had been evacuated for some reason or other. Now that there’s a newly built omnic facility that uses the nearby dam for power the city has rebuilt itself, although there’s nothing like organization or the law here.

Jesse pulls Jack forward, manhandling him out of his jacket. He’d cut it off, but he honestly isn’t sure what the damn thing is made out of and he likes his current knife. Underneath the jacket and chest armor there’s a basic white t-shirt, stained with dust and blood. Jesse leaves it on him as he carefully manoeuvres Jack to lay down so he can get his boots off. He’d criticize Jack for the layers, but he has just as many himself. Layers are how you survive.

Jack is smaller, when stripped down. Waist more narrow, shoulders not as cartoonishly broad. They haven’t really talked in years, and in Jesse’s head he’s still the Strike Commander and larger than life. Jesse roots through the medkit that’s well over a decade old, comes up with saline and alcohol, thread and a needle. No biotics, not that they’d have lasted this long anyways. Jesse rinses and stitches up Jack’s head with the flashlight from his tablet, a small pool of light in the dim room. 

There are cracks in the bone, cracks in the ivory that Jesse shouldn’t be able to touch, shouldn’t be able to look at. At the same time there’s nothing he can do so he just cleans it out the best he can, smooths it down, stitches it up around pale skin and white hair. Ana had made him and Genji practice over and over, suturing up oranges and bananas and pork belly until she was satisfied that they could put someone back together in the field. 

He should contact her, Jesse thinks as he damps down a rag and wipes blood away from the other already-healing cuts. He’ll wait though, to see if Jack makes it or not. It’ll be two very different conversations, otherwise. 

Jack is covered in scratches and gashes, but they seem to be mending without much help from Jesse, thank god. Nothing that needs stitches, just surface cuts that had bled a lot. He peers closely, could swear he sees the skin knitting back together. He’d seen it happen with Gabriel of course, and he knew that Jack had been through the same program but it’s different to see it up close like this without interference. 

Sitting back, Jesse cracks his neck. He doesn’t know why he cares, exactly. He and Jack were never particularly close and Soldier 76 is...something else again. At the same time, he knows that Jack would do the same for him - as reluctantly as Jesse is now, but would take care of him all the same.

With a sigh Jesse realizes that the bed’s too narrow to hold both of them, and he’ll be spending the night in the armchair. He’s had worse nights, but he was really looking forward to stretching out. With a final glance over Jack’s unconscious body, Jesse settles his hat over his face and goes to sleep.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jesse knows he’s being watched when he wakes up. 

He tilts his hat back onto his head, squinting into the morning light. On his bed, two bright blue eyes are looking at him. “Hello,” a raspy, roughly familiar voice says.

“Nngh,” Jesse says in response, struggling for a moment until he’s freed himself of his serape and is sitting upright. He rubs the sleep from his eyes with one hand, stabbing at his tablet with the other until numbers flash at him. It’s too early, especially for the amount of sleep he got. 

“Coffee?”

There’s a soft sound of assent from the bed so Jesse gets up, stumbles to the small kitchenette. The machine is already loaded up and spits out something akin to tar in less than a minute. It has caffeine, though, so Jesse’s calling it a win. He dumps sugar into both cups - regardless of how Jack normally drinks it, this shit needs something to combat the battery acid bitterness of it. 

He puts one chipped cup on the nightstand next to Jack, who is gingerly sitting up. Jesse flops back down into the armchair, lips thinning away from the bitter brew until he gets used to it. “Found you knocked out in the former bank buildin’,” he starts, watching as Jack takes a careful sip from his own mug. 

“Hauled you back here, ‘s an old Blackwatch hidey hole that got decommissioned when the city went under. No one touched it, thank god. Put you back together best I could, your gear’s all here far as I know, guns are over in the corner. Dunno where you were camped out but you’re welcome to stay as long as you like, I got my bounty so I was gonna head out soon. If your tablet isn’t workin’ I’ve got mine, Ana’s number’s in there if you want it.”

Jack takes a slow sip, before looking Jesse in the eyes. There’s something - off about his expression, something Jesse can’t quite put a finger on until:

“That all seems like good information to have but, uh. Who are you?”

Jesse gives himself the luxury of spending a long moment staring before blinking slowly. “You don’t remember me.” That’s...not good.

Jack looks down into his coffee for a moment before meeting Jesse’s gaze once more. “I don’t remember  _ me _ .”

That is. Less good.

“You...don’t remember being Soldier 76? Or Jack Morrison?” He watches Jack’s mouth wrap around the names silently, before he shakes his head, wincing as the stitches pull.

“I don’t know my name. Or what I look like. Or who you are.” If Jesse had been skeptical before, he isn’t any longer. There’s an overlay of careful calm hiding confusion in Jack’s voice. It’s - clumsy, nothing the polished Jack Morrison would ever sound like. He isn’t used to thinking of Jack or who he became as human with normal human flaws but now...

Jesse blinks for a moment before getting up and going to the bathroom. He pulls the shaving mirror off of the wall, hands it to Jack before sitting back down in the chair. Jack first turns his head, touches the stitched up cut with a faint frown. “Thank you,” he says, looking up at Jesse. Jesse nods but doesn’t say anything.

Jack touches his hair, seemingly surprised at its color. He runs fingers over the scars on his face - the long one cutting across his forehead, the smaller one dividing his mouth in half. He pulls up his shirt, touching the various long-healed lines as he squints at them in the small mirror. Jesse’s never seen Jack like this, and can’t help but assess with a professional’s eye the sheer amount of damage the man took over the course of his career.

He pulls his shirt down slowly, looking blankly off into the distance. Sharp blue eyes snap up and fix Jesse in place, and for a moment it’s like Strike Commander Morrison is right here with him. “Who am I?” Jack says, the confusion in his voice gone and replaced by anger.

“You are - were - Jack Morrison. Strike Commander of Overwatch.” At Jack’s blank look, Jesse rubs his head. This is going to take longer than he thought.

He explains what Overwatch was. Who Jack was. Scrabbles at the bits of knowledge dropped by Gabriel over the years to explain Jack’s history, to explain SEP. 

“So I’m - what, superhuman?” Jack says with a skeptical look.

Jesse shrugs. “All I know is that you shouldn’t be alive right now with the crack on the head you took yesterday, certainly not with the amount of blood you lost. Annoyin’ as this is, by rights it should be much worse.”

Jack pokes at a scab on his arm. “I know that this isn’t healing properly. I mean - it’s too fast, not how people are supposed to heal.”

Cocking his head. Jesse chews on a lip. “What - do you know?”

Jack shrugs helplessly as he stares into space. “I know what injuries should look like and when. I can do math, I can read,” he says with an absent wave at the coffee mug that has lettering on it. The writing is in French, but Jesse’s not going to mention it. “I know I don’t like sitting still. I know that I want to be moving on, that I feel like I should be  _ doing _ something.” He squints at the mug. “I know I like creamer in my coffee.

“I think I know how to do things, just not - not how I learned them in the first place.” 

Jesse pulls his backup piece out from his thigh holster and with a quick check to make sure the safety is on, tosses it over to Jack. Jack snatches it out of the air, checks the slide and the magazine and flicks the safety on and off before putting it back together. Seconds of work, done on autopilot. 

“Looks like you’ve got muscle memory,” Jesse says, and takes the gun back when Jack holds it out, blinking in confusion at himself.

“So that’s Jack Morrison,” Jack says. “Now who is Soldier 76?”

“Overwatch - fell. Doesn’t exist anymore.”

Jack cocks his head. “Why?”

With a headshake, Jesse sits back. “I can’t completely tell you. Ana - your right hand woman, back then - went missin’. I was sent out after her and…” he trails off, not willing to get into that saga. “I didn’t come back afterwards. Not long after I left there was an explosion. They said that everyone was dead, which,” he gestures at Jack. “Wasn’t true. Also said it was from a fight between you and Gabriel which also - I wasn’t there, but it feels like PR spin. Don’t think that’s true either.”

Jack turns the coffee mug around in his hands. “You mentioned him before, but. Who is Gabriel?”

Now that’s a fucking question.

Jesse does his best to explain Blackwatch and his own position, explain who Commander Reyes was to Strike Commander Morrison. He worries at the chipped edge of his own coffee mug with a grimy thumbnail. “You two were also…” he shakes his head.

“Together?” Jack asks. His eyes meet Jesse’s for a bare second before looking away. “I know that I’m interested in men.” Jesse isn’t touching that statement with a ten foot pole.

“For a while. I’m not sure when it started, when it ended. You two were done at least a few years before the end, but it was relatively friendly from what I could tell.”

Jack’s eyes narrow slightly. “You’re not telling me something.”

You could fill books with what Jesse is leaving out about Gabriel Reyes, but he knows what Jack means. He glances around the room, at the small mirrored cabinet in the bathroom, before gesturing for Jack to get up with a motion of his hand. “Here, get up a sec. I’ll show you.”

Jack stands, wobbly for a moment. Jesse’s uncomfortable seeing his bare feet, somehow making Jack feel more naked than if he was missing actual clothing. He prods at Jack’s shoulder until he turns around, the tugs his shirt up. A soft click, as his tablet takes a picture, and he’s pushing Jack back down into bed.

Looking at the black lightning strike pattern that’s on his own back in the picture, Jack frowns. “What is this?” He hands the tablet back to Jesse, shoves an arm behind himself to try and feel it.

Jesse sighs. “I’m not s’posed to know about it, but it’s a small world. Gabriel is...not Gabriel anymore. Not the way you became a vigilante, I mean he’s literally somethin’ else. Something not human, something wrong. He’s been huntin’ you and Ana down, likely only a matter of time before he starts comin’ after me. You and Ana tangled with him a while back, he shot you in the back. You’ve seen that you can come back from a lot,” he waves at Jack’s forehead. “But Gabriel - Gabriel I don’t think you could come back from.” 

He gets up, takes Jack’s coffee cup and his own to refill. Setting it down on the nightstand next to Jack, Jesse sighs again. “Ana told me about it because she didn’t want me caught unawares if I ran into him. Which is part of what worries me about this. You shouldn’t be Soldier 76 right now, you don’t know enough. You’re too big of a target.” 

Jack’s brows draw down, heavy white lines above shadowed blue eyes. “Jack Morrison is gone. I can’t be Soldier 76. Who the hell am I supposed to be?”

Jesse sits silently, without an answer.

-x-x-x-x-x-

“The hell do you mean you can’t do anything?”

Ana’s voice comes through dimly, the line crackling. She’s somewhere in Indonesia with bad reception. “I mean that literally no one knows what to do with SEP-enhanced bodies other than let them heal. Just keep an eye on him.”

“Amari, I’ve got better fuckin’ things to do than babysit a grown man!”

“A grown man who could kill you as soon as look at you and used to be the most powerful person in the Western hemisphere. Either his memories will come back or they won’t, there’s no way to tell without far more equipment than either of us have access to, and even then we don’t know how his enhanced healing will deal with it.” A pause, with what sounds like explosions in the distance. “I need to go.”

Jesse glances over at the open door to the bathroom, where Jack is trying to shave based off of muscle memory. “The hell do I do with him in the meantime?”

“Whatever you want, McCree, just keep your heads down so certain people don’t notice you. Amari out.” There’s a click and the silence of dead air. Jesse knocks his head against the wall. He needs to get Jack just -  _ away _ from everything.

“You okay?” Jack says, toweling his face off as he comes out of the bathroom. That’s something Jesse’s been having to get used to - this Jack is  _ nice. _ He’s polite and checks in on Jesse and...god, Jesse doesn’t know what to do with him. Jesse McCree doesn’t know nice people.

“Yeah. We need…” Jesse looks around the tiny, ancient one room apartment. “We need to get out of here. But first we need to make you look not like you.”

Jack looks puzzled as he sits on the bed. “I thought everyone thought I was dead.”

“It only takes one person thinkin’ that ‘Hey, he looks an awful lot like Jack Morrison’ and talkin’ to the wrong person for there to be a whole crew after us.” He looks Jack over and rubs his forehead as he looks at his own bag. Looks like he’ll be wearing the same outfit for the next few days.

Jesse roots through his bag, comes up with a flannel shirt and a jacket with a not-insignificant number of singe marks on it. They’re roughly the same size, though they’re built a little differently. Jack can get by with his own pants, thank god. Jesse tosses the shirt and jacket onto the bed, grabbing up Soldier 76’s distinctive jacket and rolling it up until it’s just white and blue leather. He uses that to cushion the remnants of Jack’s mask and the chest armor, then rapidly packs up the rest of what he’s had scattered around the room.

“Does this look okay?” Jack asks, and Jesse looks up only to be caught off guard. Jack looks - good in his clothes. He has the first few buttons of the shirt undone, his chest too broad to close it up. Jesse isn’t used to seeing someone in his clothing that he didn’t just fuck, so it takes a second for him to get his brain back online.

“Yeah, you look...hrm.” Jesse squints at Jack’s white hair, standing out against the dark room like a signal flag. He’s sure as hell not giving up his own hat, but he might have a bandanna or something they could use. 

Opening pockets in the sides of his bag that he hasn’t ventured into for years, Jesse finally comes up with a hat. A black watchcap, all worn soft knitted wool. Jesse stares at it for a good minute, fingers tracing over the knitted fabric of unexpected memories. He lets out a soft, strangled chuckle, before turning and handing the hat to Jack. 

Jack tugs it on, the white ends of his fringe sticking out of the front. He looks curiously at Jesse, whose heart decided to twist itself around in his chest instead of beat. “Everything all right?” 

Jesse scrubs a hand over his face as he shoves Peacekeeper and his backup gun into their holsters. “Couldn’t be farther from all right, but we’ve got to get going.” Jesse gives Jack the duffel to carry, electing to hold Soldier 76’s gun himself. 

A last glance around the dark room, and they’re clattering down the stairs into the chill Montréal evening. 

“Just a question - where are we going?”

Jesse glances around the empty street, motioning for Jack to keep close behind him. “Home, or the closest thing to it these days.”

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jack’s quiet on the hypertrain. Jesse gives him an old tablet that isn’t good for much else other than media and basic internet, pulls up for him the small collection of ebooks it can access. 

Jesse, for his part, sleeps for most of the ten hour trip. Even though he knows that Jack’s the next thing to useless right now, his damn instincts still recognize him as  _ Jack, _ let him relax enough to sleep. 

As they pass through Texas, Jesse gets up, stretches. Buys a couple of bottles of water and comes back, handing one to Jack. “We’ve got about half an hour ‘til we get off in New Mexico,” he tells Jack as he settles in the seat across from him.

Jack is silent as he opens the bottle and takes a long drink. He twists it in his hands, slowly shredding the label. “I looked up articles,” he finally says. “About - who I was. Who I am now.” He looks out the window, the golden evening sun turning his eyes a strange, no-color grey. “I don’t know what I was supposed to be doing. All these people, dead. For the most part they seemed to deserve it, but.” 

Jesse doesn’t know how to reassure him. Soldier 76 has always made him nervous, operating on his own cold schedule with his own cold set of morals. Jesse’s not a particularly good person himself, but he’s as likely to drink or gamble or fuck his way out of a bad situation as anything else. Soldier 76 just - kills.

They fall into quiet, semi-companionable silence until the omnic conductor announces their arrival in Santa Fe. Jack follows Jesse, looking curiously around. 

Walking a few blocks away from the station, Jesse slips into an alleyway, happy to find his hovercycle still there under a tarp. He really should get rid of it, Ashe will be back for it someday, but he had Sombra strip out and revamp all the tech in it. Besides, it’s red. Jesse always looked good in red.

They head south, skirting various pueblos and getting closer and closer to Albuquerque until Jesse pulls off to the right. He has a small house, tucked behind a curve of the Rio Grande. It’s not much, but it’s the closest thing Jesse’s had to a home since leaving Blackwatch.

Jesse pulls into the gravel drive in a cloud of dust. Jack gets off slowly, looking around. 

“Well,” Jesse says. “Welcome to quarantine.”

-x-x-x-x-x-

It’s not much, clapboard sides and a solar panel roof that with the desert sun means he can stay off the grid. Bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen. Well-drawn water that always tastes a bit metallic, cactuses in the front yard. A small television and board-and-brick bookshelves crammed full across from a dingy plaid couch that Jesse has Jack drop his bag onto. 

(“You don’t lock your front door?” Jack had said in disbelief when Jesse had walked right in. “What the hell would you even steal?” was the wry response.)

Jesse puts Jack in the bedroom. If getting the man out of his hair means healing him up, then he’s putting him in a goddamn bed so he can get better all the faster. Jack wanders around curiously as Jesse plugs the refrigerator in and turns the stove on, putting together a dinner from the canned goods in the pantry.

“We’ll go out tomorrow, gotta get supplies and some basics for you,” Jesse says as he sets a bowl down in front of Jack. Jack pokes at the contents dubiously, but spoons some up all the same.

“I don’t have any money, I don’t think,” Jack says. He looks vaguely guilty - not the heavy guilt-of-the-world that drew lines on Jack’s forehead years before they should have been there, but the vaguely uncertain nervousness of an unexpected houseguest. It’s - odd. 

Jesse shrugs. “I had some good payouts, ‘specially from the job I just pulled. We won’t be hurtin’ for money for a while.’

Jack still seems uneasy. “Maybe I could - help. On your jobs or, around the house or something.”

Barking a laugh, Jesse gestures to the four rooms around them. “Feel free to tidy up, but it’s not like there’s a lot here.” There isn't, really. Jesse’s spent the years since he left Overwatch drifting from place to place, keeping his head down but racking up bounties all the same. This house is just - a place to be when he isn’t on a job. 

Jack insists on washing the dishes, so Jesse takes a much-needed shower. He’s been wearing these pants so long they could practically stand up on their own, and though the water smells like minerals it’s hot and plentiful. Towel around his waist, Jesse roots through the battered dresser in the bedroom, trying to remember what clothing he had that would be suitable for company. 

Jesse has work clothes and shit he wears around the house that’s more hole than fabric. He figures he probably shouldn’t give a sick old man a heart attack by wandering around with his dick out so -

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you were in here.” Jack is looking out the window instead of at Jesse, and though the light is dim Jesse could swear the man was blushing. 

“Need something?” Jesse pulls on the first t-shirt he can find, trying not to dislodge the towel. 

“The books in the living room -”

“Help yourself to whatever, I’ll be out in a minute.”

Jesse sighs once Jack is gone, pulling on a pair of sweatpants that he finds shoved in the back of a drawer. He wanders out into the living room, running fingers through tangled, damp hair.

“You have a lot of books,” Jack says from where he’s examining the makeshift shelves.

With a shrug, Jesse goes to the fridge to pull a barely-cool bottle of beer out before he sits on the couch, putting a second bottle back when Jack refuses it with a shake of his head. “Books don’t need power and when monsoon season comes the electricity gets kinda dicey so I save the generator for the fridge. They’re cheap, too. Grab up whatever I find, someday I’ll sort it all out.”

“You haven’t read them?”

“Got through a bunch, but not all of ‘em, no. Not all to my taste, at that - found one on the agriculture of Morocco the other week.”

“That sounds interesting,” Jack says as he pulls a volume off the shelf.

Jesse gives a brief laugh. “That’s right, you’re a farm boy.”

Jack turns, eyebrows raised in interest. “I am?”

He keeps forgetting, forgetting that Jack has forgotten. “Uh, yeah. Indiana somewhere. You went into the army pretty quick but grew up there.” 

“Oh.” Jack turns back around. 

Jesse’s brain is stuck twenty years ago, at severe eyes looking down on him and sneering at the gang member that Jesse had become, saying that it wasn’t worth bringing him in. Years later Gabriel had told him that Jack had been frustrated more than angry. That he saw Jesse as what could have happened to Jack, if things had gone differently. Jesse had replied that maybe they had the same farm upbringing but he was turned into an omnic orphan at ten while Jack kept his loving family, so perhaps he could shove his sanctimony. 

Gabriel had laughed, a tinge of bitterness to it, and said that he told Jack the same thing every damn day. They then proceeded to get blisteringly drunk because they still had blood and burnt flesh on their shoes and sometimes that was how you dealt with it.

Blinking out of the sleepy haze of memories, Jesse realizes Jack is in front of him. He’s waving a book, something about plants, and asking if he can borrow it to read before bed. “Yeah,” Jesse says, rubbing at his eyes. “There’s a spare toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, borrow whatever clothes you want.”

Jack hesitates. “Where are you sleeping?”

Gesturing to the couch, Jesse says, “Ta-dah.”

“I’m a guest here,” Jack says, frowning. “I can’t kick you out of your bed.”

“Please, just go to sleep,” Jesse says tiredly. “You’re on the mend and I’m perfectly healthy, I sleep on this couch all the time. I’ll be fine.” It’s usually more of passing out than falling asleep, but he isn’t going to mention that right now.

“Okay.” Jack doesn’t sound happy, but at least he’s going. Jesse feels like the past two days and nights have been one long blur of exhaustion, he can’t wait to fall over. “Jesse?”

Jesse looks over, raises an eyebrow.

“Thank you.”

He smiles, just a bit, the corner of his mouth tugging up involuntarily. “It’s not a problem. Go to bed, Jack.” 

Jesse stretches out and turns off the light, pulling the woven blanket from the back of the couch over himself. He falls asleep to the oddly comforting sounds of Jack rattling around his bedroom, getting ready for bed.

-x-x-x-x-x-

The next morning, Jesse puts on what he thinks of as his ‘civilian disguise’. Jeans, workboots, neutral long sleeved shirt to cover the arm. Not a spur or hat to be seen. He gets by here by not being Jesse McCree with everything that comes with it - he keeps the cigar and the squint, but that’s about it.

“I don’t know you that well,” Jack says as he sits down with a cup of coffee, eyeing Jesse up and down. “But I can tell that this isn’t you.”

Jesse shrugs, drinks from his own mug. “Around here I’m Joel. Familiar but not memorable, just enough so that if someone comes sniffin’ around and describes Jesse McCree, they’re not gonna make the connection to me.”

“Sounds reasonable. And who I am going to be?” 

Jesse isn’t awake enough for this. “A friend. We’ll stick with ‘Jack’.” He cracks an eye open, looks at Jack wearing tattered flannel pajama pants and a faded Blackwatch shirt stretched to its limit. “Find somethin’ to wear, we’ll get you new clothes.”

The only adaptation that the ancient pickup Jesse keeps around the back of the house has is solar power. They rattle their way towards town, the shocks in the truck barely holding on.

“You know,” Jack says over the sound of the road and the tinny norteño music coming from the speaker, “If you have some tools I could probably fix this thing up so it’s a little safer.”

Jesse takes his eyes off the road long enough to shoot Jack a glance. “What, you can’t remember your own name but you remember how to be a mechanic?”

“I grabbed a couple of books last night, technical stuff. Wanted to see if I could spark any memories.” A good idea, Jesse thinks to himself grudgingly. “I think - I think that I’m good with my hands. Good at fixing things.”

They drive along in relative silence for awhile. “That makes sense, I s’pose,” Jesse says eventually. “Not anything I knew you could do but then we never really knew each other that well.”

He can tell Jack wants to ask about that more, but they’re in town already. It’s a nice place - barely big enough to make it on a map, just enough crime that Jesse doesn’t stick out as a suspicious character, and he’s turned on the charm enough with the locals to be remembered fondly yet vaguely.

They stop for clothes first. Jesse can eyeball most of it based on how his own clothes have been fitting Jack, but he makes him try on pants and shoes. He doesn’t want Jack anywhere near jobs, but something in him makes him get Jack one of everything in black, just in case. He doesn’t comment on Jack’s choice of underwear - never had to consider Jack Morrison’s underwear before this, and wishes it had stayed that way. He does absently wonder how he chose. Guesswork?

Stopping by a tiny grocery store, Jesse is welcomed by a cracked voice exclaiming, “Joel! Mijo!” Jesse grins, broad and genuine, for what feels like the first time in months. He hugs Gaby gently - she’s a tiny woman who ran into Jesse the first time he went shopping in the larger supermarket. She took one look at his cart full of cans and microwavable frozen meals and pretty much adopted him on the spot.

She runs the small grocery that sells food out of the back counter, and Jesse regularly has dreams about her barbacoa. Gaby pats his cheeks, tells him he needs a shave and that he’s too thin, and hustles him towards the small tables at the back. Jack follows, looking all the world like a lost puppy.

Gaby sets them up with gorditas and mango dusted with chili, before putting a hand on her hip and asking Jesse who his pretty white boy was and if there were any more of them. 

Jesse’s ears flush, and he’s thankful for a moment that one of the few languages Jack doesn’t speak is Spanish. He introduces them, tells Gaby that Jack is a friend staying with him for a while. He hints at a midlife crisis, just enough to get Gaby off his back and turn her mothering ways on Jack. She stuffs him full of obleas filled with cajeta, and Jack’s politeness and inability to say no means he starts to look sick after a while.

They finally make their escape, go to the larger supermarket. Jack trudges along for a few aisles, but perks up when they reach the produce. He grabs an ear of corn, broad thumb rubbing over the textured husk. Jesse doesn’t comment when he starts to add items to the cart, looking uncertainly at Jesse after each one.

“I think I like to cook,” Jack says when they’re in the meat department. “I don’t - know, but I read a bit of a recipe book and it felt...right.” 

Jesse shrugs, waves an arm at the store. “Go right ahead, I won’t complain.” Jesse cooks to fuel himself and does love food, but he doesn’t particularly like the act of preparing it. If Jack wants to, he can go right ahead.

They put things away when they get back, and Jesse takes a nap while Jack browses through the books. Jesse’s awakened by the smell of something good.

“Whuzzat?” he mumbles, shoving his hair out of his face. 

“Chicken, rice. Mole sauce,” Jack says, pronouncing it incorrectly. Jesse wanders over, sticks a finger in to taste. Jack may not be able to say it right, but he sure as hell can cook it.

“You remembered how to make this?”

Jack shakes his head, holds up a tattered recipe book. “Nah, found it in here.” 

It tastes fantastic, and Jesse tells him so. Jack is awkward at the praise, but pleased. “Maybe I could cook around here for awhile,” he says hesitantly.

“You don’t have to earn your keep or anythin’,” Jesse says, and he can tell already this is going to be an argument they have many times.

“Just let me do this,” Jack says, and Jesse finally nods. 

They spend the evening quietly, Jack putting his things away and Jesse organizing and cleaning the kitchen so it’ll at least be semi-coherent for Jack.

Jesse showers the day off, and when he exits the bathroom already in a t-shirt and sweatpants, he tells himself that Jack doesn’t look slightly disappointed.

That would - be bad. For a multitude of reasons.

Jesse says goodnight and resolutely recites ammo calibers in his head until he falls asleep.

-x-x-x-x-x-

They start to develop a routine over the next week.

Jesse spends mornings on his tablet, trying to look for Goldilocks jobs - not so large he can’t do it on his own, not so small that the money isn’t worth the travel time. Jack reads - bits of this book, bits of that one. He checks things occasionally on the spare tablet, tells Jesse that he’s seeing if the information is still right as he waves a book from the 1980s at him.

Lunch is usually leftovers or half-assed sandwiches, both men asking awkwardly about what the other has been doing.

Afternoons are...something else. When Jesse lived alone, this was his free time. Time to watch something on the battered old tv, time to jerk off, time to just to fuck around the house. Jack, however, likes to  _ do _ things. And Jesse keeps getting dragged into it.

First he fixes up the truck, making Jesse hand him tools - half of which he’s never heard of and doesn’t know how he acquired in the first place. Jesse doesn’t like how it’s nice to listen to Jack mutter to himself as he’s underneath the truck flat on his back. Doesn’t like how Jack holds out a hand blindly and trusts Jesse to know what to slap into it. Especially doesn’t like how Jack strips down to an undershirt so as not to stain his new clothes, ending up with oil smudges on his bare shoulders and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. 

Jack tackles the tangle of scrub in the back, telling Jesse that there’s room for a small garden there. Drought resistant stuff that he wouldn’t have to do much more than water, and then he could end up with some vegetables other than peppers, Jesse, you need to eat something  _ green _ every once in a while. Jack comes back in smelling of sweat and dirt and hard work, the bridge of his nose red and the tops of his cheeks starting to freckle.

He installs a lock on the front door, having been highly annoyed when he realized that Jesse didn’t lock the house up mostly because the lock had been broken since before he’d bought the place. “My stuff is here,” he tells Jesse with a crooked smile. “I don’t care about yours, but at least let me protect mine.” 

In the evenings Jack will make dinner, something out of one of the recipe books he keeps finding on Jesse’s shelves. They talk about the day’s work quietly, companionably. The food is usually good, sometimes worryingly Midwestern. Jack digs happily into something called Watergate salad, which Jesse pokes at uneasily. Desserts shouldn’t be green, he doesn’t think. 

Jesse cleans up after, then pulls a lamp onto the kitchen table so he can sit Jack down and check over his head wound. It’s not healing like everything else. Jesse saw Gabriel with stitches a hundred times, and he could always take them out after a day or two. 

There’s still blood and lymph leaking here, the edges of the wound not sealing together. Jesse touches, presses in and Jack winces in pain. 

He calls Ana, after the third day. “I don’t get why he’s not healing up,” he says grumpily.

“I don’t know, McCree,” she replies, exhaustion clear in her voice. “Maybe whatever has messed with his memory is slowing down the healing process. That’s the whole point - no one understands how his body works.”

Jesse sighs, grunts.

“Is having him there that bad?” she asks.

“No, no,” he says, hoping that he didn’t say that too quickly. “He’s just...not himself.”

Ana snorts. “If you’d rather have Soldier 76 in your house, be careful what you wish for,” she says before hanging up.

She’s right but - 

But Jesse is still disconcerted by the stranger in his house.

This is Jack Morrison without the years in the army. Jack Morrison without whatever SEP had done to his body and brain. Jack Morrison without years of having the pressures of the world on his shoulders, without Petras breathing down his neck, without having to manage a thousand people with a hundred thousand expectations.

Jack Morrison without the influence of Gabriel Reyes. 

Jack Morrison without the expectations of a world slowly cracking him under the pressure, only to finally blow apart in an explosion that took away the most important home he’d ever known.

Jack Morrison without the bitterness and blood he used to mortar the parts of himself back together to remake himself into Soldier 76. 

This Jack is kind, hardworking, thoughtful. Surprisingly sarcastic, not one to let Jesse sit on his ass when he could be helping Jack out. Unsure of his welcome, but increasingly more confident in himself and his new place in Jesse’s life. Content in the small victories like weeding a garden or figuring out how to make mayonnaise. 

What Jack could have been, had the world not decided to rest itself upon him.

Jesse feels vaguely guilty at it all. At how he’s letting Jack live with him and fix up Jesse’s house, his life without - without addressing how the real Jack might have felt.

The real Jack Morrison had complicated feelings towards Jesse. He doesn’t know how they all shook out, but he knows that Jack initially didn’t approve of him and it took a long time for him to thaw. By the time Jesse had shown himself to be competent and trustworthy, there were...other issues. 

Issues with how close Gabriel and Jesse had become, due to the nature of Blackwatch and how they had to absolutely trust each other. Gabriel and Jack’s separation was due to far larger problems, but Jesse knows that he played a part in it, somewhere. Gabriel told him as much, later. 

Deserved blame? Possibly. Jesse doesn’t even know at this point. He just knows that Jack Morrison and Jesse McCree never truly got along, and now they’re cohabiting with an alarming ease.

Despite all of this, they could have kept threading the needle, tottering along the precipice if Jesse didn’t decide to take a job.

-x-x-x-x-x-

“I’m going to be gone for a day,” Jesse says one evening. 

Jack pauses where he’s charring tortillas on the stove, hastening to rescue one before it burns. “Where are you going?” he says carefully.

“Got a job. Need money to pay for the carnitas,” Jesse says with a wave at the delicious smelling pot on the stove. 

“Do you need any help?”

“Nah. It’s a quick thing, just some backup muscle for a friend who’s...twitchy.” Jesse never minds being a lookout for Sombra. Her skills mean that her jobs bring in the big bucks and she’s relatively generous about giving Jesse his cut after he saved her life a time or ten.

Dinner that night is more stilted than usual somehow, more silence than conversation. When Jesse does his nightly inspection of Jack’s head, his fingers are more gentle than usual. An unconscious apology, for something he doesn’t know why he’s apologizing for. 

It’s when Jesse’s fingers are warm on Jack’s temple, more caress than clinical, that he speaks up. “What are you going to do when it’s all healed?”

Jesse sits back, shrugs. “Depends on you, I guess. You don’t want to be goin’ out there if your memory’s still gone but when it comes back you’re not gonna want to stay.”

“How do you know? That I wouldn’t want to stay.” Jack’s sitting too close, eyes too large and guileless, focused on Jesse’s face. 

Jesse shifts uncomfortably. “You have a life of your own, shit that I’m sure you want to get done.”

“I wouldn’t just abandon you.” 

Christ, he’s so  _ sincere. _

Jesse gets up, puts the lamp back and wipes down the already clean counter. “You don’t - you have a mission of some kind, Jack. I don’t know what it is, but it’s all you’ve focused on the last few years. You need to go back to that, back to bein’ yourself.”

Drumming his fingers on the table, Jack has a stubborn set to his mouth. “I was reading one of the books. There were monkeys and Pinker and Morris and - anyways. I’m the definition of a blank slate, Jesse. Tabula rasa. This is - my truest self. Whenever my memories come back, this is still the core of me.”

Nature versus nurture never contemplated the idea of the SEP, never could conceive of a generation affected by omnics. Never took into account the thousand blows that shaped the facets of Jack Morrison.

Jesse gives Jack a tight smile and just says, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

When Jesse gets dressed in the dawn light, it’s like he’s putting the parts of himself back together. The comforting leather of his chaps tight around his thighs, the weight of his belts on his hips. The chest armor that he could swear feels a little tighter - he’s been eating well, with Jack feeding him. He’s finally putting back on some of the weight he lost after leaving Blackwatch.

His serape is draped over the back of the chair and his hat is on the table as he eats oatmeal. Jack stumbles into the kitchen, hair still mussed in bedhead. Sleepy eyes look Jesse over, before he shakes his head and goes to make coffee. 

Jesse puts his bowl in the sink to soak, puts the last few bits of his uniform on. “I’ll be back in the evenin’,” he says as he snaps Peacekeeper into her holster against his thigh. “You know where the truck keys are, and…” 

He doesn’t want to say ‘if I don’t come back’, figures that Jack’s smart enough to know what to do.

Jack looks at him with curiously blank eyes and nods, silently drinking his coffee. Jesse gives an awkward nod and heads out the door.

It’s a pretty easy job, as far as these kind of things go. Keep an eye out as Sombra breaks into the new, secret LumériCo plant that’s being constructed about as far from Dorado as possible. The security there is nothing to laugh at, and they’re specifically gunning for Sombra.

Sombra gets in, Jesse watches her back, it all goes well. Goes well - until they try to leave. An alarm goes off while they’re just standing there doing nothing - they can’t tell if it’s something one of them did, or they were just discovered. At least it’s omnics and not people - it’s easier for him to take them down robots when he doesn’t have to think if they’re just some poor schmuck trying to earn money for their family.

They get away clean, though one of them wings Jesse on their way out. It’s nothing so bad that adrenaline doesn’t overwhelm the pain, and it feels burned so the cauterization takes care of a blood trail. Jesse drops Sombra off at her chosen neutral spot, she sends him off with a nice chunk of change dropped in the offshore bank account she set up for him and a kiss on the cheek.

He returns to a darkened house, and something he didn’t know was tight in his chest loosens to see the truck still parked there. 

Jesse drops his bag by the coffee table, sits on the couch and leans his head back for just a second. When he opens his eyes, Jack is standing over him, looking down with a frown.

“You look like hell,” he says bluntly.

Jesse shrugs - or tries to, at least. He hisses when his burned arm moves. Jack pulls him to his feet with lowered brows, makes Jesse show him how his armor unlocks. The burn is on his bad arm, a shot that grazed the back of his shoulder down to his triceps. Jack has to pull the shirt away from where it’s sticking to the flesh. He jerks his head at the shower and Jesse nods tiredly. He needs to get the road dust off, before it does god knows what to the wound.

When Jesse shuts the shower off, he pulls the curtain aside to find his softest sweatpants and a t-shirt that’s always been too big on him folded neatly and set on a corner of the sink. He puts them on, wincing as the shirt touches raw flesh.

Jack herds him into the kitchen, the lamp and medkit that Jesse uses for Jack’s nightly checkups in place. He gets the shirt off of Jesse, hisses when he sees the burn under good lighting. Jack roots around in the kit, pulls out a tube of something that he smears around the edges of the wound. Jesse sits quietly, lets Jack tend to him in the soft pool of light surrounded by darkness. 

He doesn’t normally allow people to see him like this - bare, vulnerable. Over the years it’s basically been restricted to his strike team and the med unit. Anyone else got Jesse in full uniform - damage? What damage? He learned to walk evenly on broken legs decades ago.

Jack tapes gauze in place, holds Jesse’s shirt so he can get back into it. Jesse wants to say something but doesn’t want to interrupt the strange tension-filled atmosphere that hangs over everything. Jack puts away the medkit and washes his hands, and the bedroom door clicks shut a minute later. 

Jesse’s left with an empty table and a lamp, exhaustion and a strange sense of contentment.

-x-x-x-x-x-

They’ve settled back into a routine again - Jack is building a garage out back now out of scrap wood he and Jesse get from pallets they rescue from the dump and load into the back of the truck. It’s to keep the sun off the truck and for somewhere to put all of his stuff, you can’t wonder why the lawnmower doesn’t start when you just leave it outside to  _ rust, _ Jesse. 

Jesse finds another job, something quick and way the fuck over in Newfoundland, though he has a plane ticket so it shouldn’t take long. Get a briefcase full of some technology Jesse doesn’t want to know about from an office building, deliver to the client on Prince Edward Island, get paid. 

Everything goes well until he’s struggling to get back up through the hole he’d prised open in the ceiling of the elevator. Damn security guards. One of them has a shotgun, and Jesse gets a leg full of scattershot for his troubles. Not enough to really damage him, just enough to ruin his day.

Once he gets clear he pulls his pants down, wraps a couple of bandannas tightly around his thigh so he won’t be bleeding through. It’s enough to brace the leg, keep him going. He delivers the package, gets a nice payout in return and a promise to keep Jesse’s name in mind for future jobs. 

He returns to a warmly lit house, Jack curled up in the armchair with tablet in hand. It’s - comforting to return to, Jesse reluctantly admits in the back of his brain. Jack gets up and goes to the bedroom, giving Jesse privacy to get changed. Jesse doesn’t take the wraps off his leg until he’s in the bathroom, and it’s to a pained exhale and a soft patter of blood on the tiled floor. 

Jesse wipes the blood up haphazardly before getting in the shower. It feels good, even as his leg feels like it’s on fire. When he gets out he puts on boxers before sitting on the toilet and stretching his leg out to rest on the edge of the tub. This is the fun part, for varying definitions of “fun”.

With tweezers in hand Jesse picks the bits of shot out one by one, letting them fall into the sink with soft clinks. He’s at it for perhaps ten minutes before there’s a knock on the door.

“Jesse? You okay in there?” Jack sounds like he’s trying not to sound worried.

“I’m fine, you don’t have to -” Jesse had locked the door, but Jack still pushes it open with little effort. Jesse sighs as the wood around the lock splinters. “I’m fine, Jack.”

Jack looks at Jesse’s blood covered hands, the floor, and the sink full of shining silver, and raises an eyebrow. He disappears for a moment, comes back with an ugly brown towel that he normally uses to wipe oil off of himself and spreads it primly on the floor. He then sits, easily plucking the tweezers out of Jesse’s hand and slapping his hand away.

Jesse lets Jack work for a while before he speaks up. “I can do this myself, y’know. It’s just - what happens after jobs, sometimes.”

A piece of shot, dug out from behind Jesse’s knee with what seems to Jesse to be more vehemence than delicacy, hits the sink so hard it bounces back out again. “I’m here now,” Jack says, and his voice has something of a threat in it. 

“Are you just not that good at your job, is that it?” Jack asks five minutes later, picking up the conversation like it hadn’t died an awkward death. “Because it seems every time you do this you end up injured.” He glances assessing eyes over Jesse’s bare chest with the scars cutting tracks through the thick hair, and Jesse shifts uncomfortably.

Shrugging a shoulder, Jesse says, “It’s the nature of the beast. I get stuff or retrieve people from people who don’t want to let go of that stuff or people. And they object with guns. Just how it is.”

“And the legality of these jobs?” It’s not a question, not really.

“Legal stopped meanin’ anything when you get despots in power,” Jesse says. “I don’t fuck with civilians unless I have to, though.” 

Another clink, another few drops of blood. “You like to pretend that you’re all morally grey, but you call them ‘civilians’ like you’re back in Blackwatch,” Jack says. 

Something that’s not a smile twists the corner of Jesse’s mouth. “We weren’t good people in Blackwatch.” Jack meets his eyes. “And I’m not any better for bein’ out of it.” 

The last few pieces of shot are dug out in silence. Jesse wipes his leg and the floor down as Jack gets gauze, which he wraps around Jesse’s thigh. It’s been - a while since anyone’s been on their knees for Jesse, so he digs tattered fingernails into his other thigh to keep his dick down as Jack’s large and capable hands tug and pat the gauze into place. 

When Jack leaves and Jesse struggles his way into pants and a shirt, he feels oddly cold.

-x-x-x-x-x-

The garage gets done. It’s not pretty but it’s functional and does what it’s meant to do. Jesse feels like there’s a metaphor for Jack in that somewhere, but doesn’t give enough of a shit to parse it out. 

Jack starts eyeing the boards-and-bricks bookshelves, and Jesse gives in to the inevitable. They actually venture into town, getting decent wood from the hardware store that matches the rest of the house. Jack never seems more like the old Jack when he’s standing in front of a display with his back straight and hands on his hips, telling some hapless shop assistant exactly what he needs. 

While Jack is measuring the space where the shelves will be installed that night, Jesse gets a ping on his tablet. Another job - he normally doesn’t have this many in a row, he should be able to relax for a bit after this.

“I should be able to get the outer supports in tomorrow,” Jack says as his tape measure snaps back. “I want to keep the brick as the back, you’ll have to be careful not to shove books up against it so as not to tear the pages up but it’ll look real nice.”

“Could you handle that on your own?” Jesse says absently. “Got a thing.”

He doesn’t notice Jack hasn’t answered until there’s a shadow over him. Jesse looks up to see Jack looming over him. “No.”

“I really wasn’t askin’ you for permission, Jack -”

“Your leg is barely healed from a few days ago! You’re still injured, it’ll slow you down and you’ll just get hurt worse.”

Jesse’s starting to get annoyed. “This is a guy I’ve worked with a bunch before, but he’s twitchy; if I flake out on him, I don’t know if he’ll contact me again and he pays well. I do this, and I don’t have to take another job for a month.”

Jack glares down at him, square jaw even more geometric than usual as he clenches his teeth. “I want to come.”

“Absolutely not.”

Jack sits down on the coffee table, knees bumping Jesse’s where he’s slouching on the sofa. “I’ve been hauling around wood, metal, and equipment for weeks now. I know what my body is capable of and I’d really like to see you try and stop me.”

Jesse sighs, scrubs a hand over his face. “Just because you know how strong you are doesn’t mean you can do this, Jack. You don’t remember how to shoot. You don’t - remember how to kill.”

“So show me.” At Jesse’s raised eyebrow, Jack gestures to the small writing desk at the side of the room where Peacekeeper is laid out with her cleaning kit. “I used to do this, I just have to feel it again.”

Jack’s face is determined and in the back of Jesse’s mind a small voice goes  _ it’s not anything new, it’s just reminding him of what he used to be _ and something about that makes Jesse’s chest go tight. 

“Okay,” Jesse says nearly silently on an exhale, then louder: “Okay.” He closes his eyes for a moment so as not to see the smile on Jack’s face. “No pulse rifle, though, and no uniform. You’re not him. You don’t want to be him.”

He gets up, goes to the locked cabinet where he keeps his weapons. Alternating between sorting through and eyeing Jack, he comes up with two small pulse pistols. No ammo to reload, and solid enough in their curved design that Jesse’s used them as makeshift brass knuckles on occasion. 

Grabbing the recycling bag full of empty beer bottles that he and Jack had gone through that night, Jesse motions for Jack to follow him to the backyard. He sets the bottles up on a stump in a row. He gives Jack one gun, holds the other as he explains how it functions. 

Jack nods, then before Jesse can explain further than taking off the safety, reaches out and fires five shots without even seeming to look. Each one shatters a bottle.

Jesse just stares as Jack turns the gun over in his hands. “I - know this, I think. Used this before.” 

Abandoning the rest of what would have been his lesson, Jesse sighs. “Okay. You can - you’re fine at that, I guess.” As they head back inside, Jesse says, “It’s just a transport job. Ship coming in to the port of Cabo San Lucas down in Baja California Sur, we get the cargo from the captain and bring it up to Mexicali.”

“When?”

“We’ll leave in the afternoon, get back early morning. Take a nap, I want you sharp.”

He avoids Jack’s face, doesn’t want to see the happiness on it. When Jesse rolls over that night unable to sleep, he tells himself that he doesn’t feel guilty. For keeping Jack sheltered as he has been, for letting the leash go slack. 

He doesn’t. 

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jesse has Jack put on the pants, boots, and chest armor from his Soldier uniform. A dark canvas jacket and a hat to hide his hair, and it’s about as good as it gets. Jesse looks much the same, having traded his serape for a dark coat that hides his own chest armor and arm. Weapons are tucked away in holsters - not so hidden that people won’t know they’re not armed, but not obtrusive.

It goes well, for the most part. They take a hypertrain down, make it to the port in the evening without much trouble. The cargo is a crate, not heavy but bulky. Jack carries the crate as Jesse signs the manifest, and they get right back to the train, stopping for burritos on the way.

They deliver the cargo just fine, and it’s then that Jesse should have gotten suspicious - when was the last time he ever had a job go this smoothly?

To get to the delivery point they’d had to go through a maze of alleyways, and they’re almost to the main street when a handful of figures melt out of the shadows. They have glowing skulls painted on them, and Jesse grinds his teeth in annoyance. Sombra used to be involved with them, but these kids look young enough that he can’t use her name as shibboleth.

“So you delivered something,” the leader says. “Delivery boys get paid.”

Jesse rubs his forehead. God, he wasn’t this bad when he was in Deadlock, was he? “No cash, it’s in an offshore account, and we don’t have anythin’ on us. This doesn’t have to go bad, folks.”

A grin, teeth white and gleaming in the glow of the paint. “Too late, old man.”

Old- Jesse’s not old! This punk’s paying for that. Jesse flicks the safety off of Peacekeeper, rests his hand on the grip. “I don’t feel like -” he starts, but some idiot in glowing orange off to the side is leaping for him. 

“Try not to kill them,” he yells at Jack, before shooting the kid in the leg. They’re young and dumb and full of - idiotic ideals. If Jesse had been raised a couple hundred of miles west, this would have likely been him. 

Fucking teenagers.

Why couldn’t it be Talon, someone he wouldn’t mind firing a bunch of headshots at? He’s trying to ignore that if Jack wasn’t there he’d be much less merciful.

Jack seems to be having the time of his life, not even firing his guns but just using them to pistolwhip the kids down into submission. One of them gets in a lucky shot, smashing her forehead into Jack’s nose. Jack throws her into a wall hard enough to shatter some of the bricks. The sound of the woman’s body dropping to the ground seems to end the fight, the few standing members dragging their compatriots into the darkness.

Standing in a beam of moonlight, blood streams down from Jack’s nose. He grins, black blood filling the spaces between his teeth, and combined with the near-feral light in his blue eyes he seems otherworldly in the black Mexican night.

He’s goddamn beautiful, and Jesse has to force himself to turn away before he does something stupid.

Kneeling, Jesse pulls a bandanna from where it’s wrapped around an unconscious gang member’s face and hands it to Jack to wipe himself off. They don’t speak, but their shoulders brush together as they make their way to the train station, adrenaline still sparking through their veins. 

The train ride is less than an hour, but it helps burn off the residual excitement. Jesse gets the hovercycle from where he stashed it in an alleyway, and they make their way home. To - their home. Jesse realizes that he’s thinking of his place as belonging to both of them now, and doesn’t know how he feels about that. 

They get in, and both men start taking off armor - Jack less familiar with the buckles and latches than Jesse is. It takes a while, but other than Jack’s nose which has already set and mostly healed, there are no real injuries to worry about. Just a nice chunk of change for Jesse and a trip outside for the both of them. 

Neither man has spoken since the delivery, but it’s not an awkward silence. More one of - anticipation. Jesse doesn’t know what’s coming, though he really should. He’s down to underwear and t-shirt, going to the bathroom to wash his face when Jack grabs him by the front of his shirt and pushes him against the wall.

Jesse tries to say something, but Jack’s mouth is there against his, hot and wet and still tasting faintly of the lime and cilantro from dinner and blood from the fight. Jesse goes along with it for a minute, because it’s Jack, all enthusiasm and broad chest pressing him into the wall until the door frame digs into his shoulder but god, it’s worth it for the broad hand wrapped around his waist. 

But then - it’s Jack. It’s  _ Jack, _ who doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t remember that he dislikes Jesse McCree, doesn’t remember anything. Jesse can’t do this. 

He tears his mouth away, panting into the darkness of the hallway as Jack sucks a mark into the side of his neck. “Jack. Jack - no,  _ Jack.” _

The other man pulls back, just a few inches to look at Jesse in the eyes from a half step away. That’s just not fair. Jesse looks off to the side for courage before looking back. “We can’t.”

“Why not?” Jack shifts a step, a broad thigh pressing between Jesse’s legs. “You seem to be enjoying yourself enough.”

“Yes - fuck, stop that - I am, but you’re not. I mean, you wouldn’t. You’re not  _ you, _ Jack. And when you remember yourself you’re gonna fuckin’ hate me.”

Jack presses a quick kiss to Jesse’s mouth, another to the hinge of his jaw. His lips are against Jesse’s ear when he murmurs, “You’ve been taking care of me for months, Jesse. I’m still me, even without my memories. Still me, in my body. In this body. Let me take care of you.” 

Jesse wants to say no, a picture of Soldier 76 with his visor in place glaring at him angrily drifting across his brain. But then Jack has one hand in his hair and another pressed against where Jesse is throbbing in his pants, and Jesse can’t remember what he was protesting at all.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Memory-wiped Jack Morrison may be the only person on the planet who can give an earnest blowjob. He looks up at Jesse with shining blue eyes and a red mouth stretched wide and Jesse covers his face with a hand, feeling like a bad person as he comes down Jack’s throat with a grunt. Jack scatters kisses as he crawls up Jesse’s body, and when he gets to the top Jesse kisses him firmly back, tasting what Jack’s mouth is like with traces of himself still clinging to his tongue. 

Jesse pushes Jack down, because if he’s sucking Jack’s cock then he doesn’t have to look at the openness of his face. He still hears Jack, though. Little moans and gasps, sometimes louder when Jesse does something particularly nice and Jack forgets to be embarrassed. His hips twitch and he thrusts deep into Jesse’s mouth like no one told him it was rude - 

\- and Jesse realizes with a groan around Jack’s cock that no one ever  _ has _ told him, because this is the first blowjob that Jack, memoryless Jack, has ever experienced. Jesse has to get a hand around himself at that thought, because he gets painfully hard at it, at how he’s Jack’s  _ first _ somehow. 

Jack is shameless when he comes, one hand fisted in Jesse’s hair and the other in the sheets, back arched and moaning loudly. Jesse swallows him down, licks him until he’s clean and soft and then rests his head against Jack’s hairy, scarred inner thigh as he artlessly jacks himself off. 

Jesse slides off the end of the bed with a painful noise, his back just isn’t as flexible as it used to be. He wipes his hand off on a shirt - his, Jack’s, he barely even knows the difference any longer - and gets back into bed. Unsurprisingly, Jack is a cuddler. He wraps an arm around Jesse’s chest, rubs his face against his beard like a needy cat, tangles their legs together like he has any right to.

He falls asleep just like that, and Jesse spends a while staring at the ceiling of the bedroom that used to be his and now he thinks of as Jack’s. Post-orgasmic relaxation slides through his limbs like warm honey but there’s a niggling part in the back of his brain that says  _ Danger, Jesse McCree.  _

Jesse presses his nose into Jack’s hair that smells like his own shampoo and ignores it, falling asleep quickly.

The morning is just like any other morning, except Jesse’s back feels better from sleeping in an actual bed instead of the couch, and he gets kisses sour with morning breath pressed to the soft spot under his jaw when he wakes up.

Jesse sorts through books as Jack measures for the shelves, trying to figure out how to screw them into the brick the way he wants. It’s both the same routine they’ve had for weeks, but also different somehow. They don’t talk more or differently, they don’t touch each other any more, but the - atmosphere is changed. Jesse can’t put his finger on it, and it bothers him a bit.

After they put the dishes away in the evening Jesse checks Jack’s head like usual. The stitches came out a week ago, but the scar is still vicious and red, a lurid curve cutting across fair skin and white hair. 

“Tell me, doc. Will I survive?” Jack says, with a smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. Jesse runs fingers over the cut that then trail down to run over sharp cheekbones, a square chin. 

“You will. I might not,” Jesse murmurs against Jack’s mouth, before catching it in a kiss that starts sweet and ends desperate and biting without either of them meaning it to. 

They stumble back to the bedroom, hands clutching at each other like they’re worried they’ll be pulled apart. Jesse pushes Jack down onto the bed and turns the bedside light on because he wants - needs to see this.

Jesse leaves Jack there as he pulls his clothes off quickly. “Is this your idea of a striptease?” Jack asks as he lazily undoes the buttons on his own shirt. 

“No, this is me being efficient.” Jesse says before yanking Jack’s pants down without bothering to undo the button. Jack gives a startled laugh and Jesse savors the sound, slots it into the filing cabinet in his brain so he can take it out and play with it later. 

Finally Jack is bare beneath him, flushed from his cheeks down to his chest. Jesse traces the edge of the redness, smirking as it spreads. He lays down to the side of Jack so he won’t crush him, pulls him in so he can press long kisses to his mouth. There’s something comforting about tasting the same meal on Jack’s breath as his own, smelling the same soap and shampoo on both their bodies.  _ Mine, _ Jesse’s senses all say.  _ Mine. _

“I want you to fuck me,” Jack mutters into Jesse’s mouth, and Jesse’s breath stutters for a second. 

“Really,” he says as a hand curves around, cups Jack’s ass. “Can’t remember your own name but you know you like to get fucked.”

Jack’s face feels hot against Jesse’s lips, skin flushed with arousal and embarrassment. “Might have - tried a few things,” he says, refusing to meet Jesse’s eyes.

“Mmm,” Jesse says into Jack’s neck, bites harder than necessary just to hear Jack choke back a curse before kissing the word out of his mouth. “Right here? I give you my own bed, take care of you here in my house, and you just what,” he presses a dry finger against Jack’s hole, feels the muscle tense up. “Just got yourself off like you were right at home.”

Jack’s breathing hot and humid into Jesse’s throat, and Jesse reaches a hand behind himself to fumble at the nightstand drawer. When his fingers press back against Jack they’re cool and slick this time, and Jesse teases and pets his way inside until Jack relaxes enough to let him in. 

“I’d say somethin’ about how long it’s been since you got fucked, but we don’t really know, do we? Could have been the day before I picked you up, could have been ten years ago.” Jesse twists his fingers, and Jack’s shoulders shake in a silent sob breathed into Jesse’s collarbone. “I do know that I’m the only one you’re gonna remember, only one you’re gonna care about after this.”

If Jesse was a nicer person he’d let Jack get on his hands and knees, prep him careful and easy and let him set the pace. But he’s not, so he ends up curled above Jack, driving him into the mattress slow and brutally deep. Jack’s arms are braced above him so he doesn’t get shoved into the wall, unable to get a hand around himself. Jesse watches the flush spread down Jack’s chest, white hair and whiter scars standing out against it. 

He finally wraps a fist around Jack’s cock out of pity, painfully red and dripping steadily. Jack comes with a sound of sheets tearing and a choked off gasp, stomach muscles twitching as he spills across his skin and Jesse’s hand. Jesse doesn’t waste time after that, slamming hard into Jack’s limp body a handful of times until he’s clawing marks into Jack’s shoulder, shuddering his own release deep in Jack.

They don’t move for long minutes, Jesse softening and eventually slipping out, Jack running fingers through Jesse’s tangled hair. They talk, murmured bits of conversation about nothing, until they’re both uncomfortable and sticky enough to get up. 

A quick shower, hands wandering but neither man has the refractory period to keep going just then. They put on pants, soft and warm against the chilly night. Jack wanders to the kitchen, gets out a container of corn salsa that he eats with a spoon, smiling at Jesse’s vaguely disgusted face. Jesse grabs up the pile of books he’d been sorting through earlier.

He likes the organization. Figuring out what he or Jack would like to read, setting aside ones that are stained or torn beyond repair or just too out of date. The living room is full of piles of them now, with the stacks of wood that Jack’s been working on in the background. It’s a mess, to be honest. But it’s - starting to feel like a home. Like his home, somewhere other than just to get sleep in between jobs. 

As Jesse watches Jack poke at a shelf he’d put up earlier, salsa still in hand, he gets a worrying feeling of - happiness? 

Ugh.

It’s not that it’s bad, per se, but people like Jesse and Jack - or who Jack used to be - don’t get this. They don’t get the happy endings. They just keep going and working and chugging along because that’s what people like them  _ do. _ Jesse stands up, trying to stave off the feeling of unease he’s getting. 

“Hey, let’s go to bed,” he says, and Jack turns and smiles and -

The shelf he was examining falls with a soft crumbling of brick, and hits Jack before catching Jesse in the stomach. Jesse bends over, breathing shallowly and desperately, trying to keep his dinner where it’s supposed to be. It takes him a good few minutes to straighten up, to look at Jack. 

Jack’s swaying a bit, eyes unfocused and dazed. “You okay?” Jesse asks, and it takes several seconds before Jack can focus on him.

“Yeah,” he says, but it’s not very convincing. Jesse shakes his head, tells Jack to put the salsa down. It takes a few tries before Jack can put the container down onto the coffee table instead of into thin air, but he manages it eventually. 

Jesse wraps an arm around Jack’s shoulders, steers him into the bedroom. He checks Jack’s head over carefully with the light - there’s a slight raised bump, but nothing else. No broken skin, and Jack’s eyes are already focusing better. “It’d be sad if we survived all of this just for you to be taken out by a bookshelf,” he says as he runs fingers through Jack’s thinning hair. 

Jack rolls his eyes, then winces at the movement. “Nah, can’t die yet. I have to finish building them,” he says, and something in Jesse warms at the statement. Because yes, the bookshelves are part of Jesse’s house, but Jack wanted them for - himself. He’s spent weeks complaining about the lack of organization and now he’s staking his own claim, putting his mark in Jesse’s home. 

“You think I need to wake you up?” Jesse asks, glancing over at his tablet and wondering if he should set an alarm for every hour. 

Jack sinks back into the pillows, shaking his head carefully. “I’ll be fine. Go to sleep.” 

Jesse turns out the lights, the room only lit by moonlight cutting through the tree branches outside the window. He runs fingers over Jack’s old injury, over the new one, before Jack takes his hand and pulls it across his chest.

Settling down, Jesse is lulled into sleep by Jack’s steady, deep breaths.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jack is still asleep when Jesse gets up, snoring lightly into the pillow right next to Jesse’s ear. Jesse scratches at his belly as he stumbles to the kitchen, brain not quite online. Grounds, water, measure, press the button. It’s about all his brain is good for right now.

He’s sleepily stirring sugar into his cup with one hand and jabbing at his tablet with the other when he hears Jack come in. “Coffee’s ready,” he says, voice raspy with sleep. Jack doesn’t respond, but given he’s not particularly verbal in the mornings it takes a minute for Jesse to realize something is wrong and look up.

Jack looks  _ murderous. _ Jesse is suddenly, painfully awake, and he sits up slowly. He’s not wearing a shirt - he feels unprotected, he should be wearing a shirt for this. 

“Did you think it was  _ funny?” _ Jack hisses out, and Jesse sits back like he was slapped. “Playing happy little househusbands when I didn’t fucking know any better? Did it make you feel all  _ powerful, _ McCree, to have me trailing along behind you like a puppy, to have me goddamn neutered?”

It’s all the things that Jesse’s hindbrain has been telling him for months, except it’s so very much worse coming from Jack’s mouth, honest and venomous. 

“I had work to do. Major projects in place, and because I’ve been trapped here, I’m sure all my contacts think I”m dead and have shut everything down.”

Jesse swallows, finds his voice. “What should I have done, Jack? No one knew what you were cookin’ up, not me, not Ana. If I’d kicked you out, people would have hunted you down and killed you, and you wouldn't have the first idea of how to defend yourself!”

“Did you talk to anyone?” Jack fires back. “Ask Ana if she knew anyone in neurology? Ask Angela, or even that little techy asshole friend of yours? Someone would have been able to help, someone could have worked to bring me back. Instead you left me here to do your housework and warm your bed.”

Jesse’s mouth is hanging open. He’s - fuck, he’s right. Jesse had just taken Ana’s word that he should keep an eye on Jack and just...given up. It was nice to have another person around. Not as his fucking housekeeper, Jack’s wrong about that, just to have a person to talk to. Who could know what Jesse did, know who he was.

He has to clarify though - “If you do remember, then you know we weren’t sleeping together the whole time.”

“Of course not,” Jack snaps back. “Just long enough for you to get tired of having a husband without the benefits, huh? Still managed to get your dick wet in the end. And you liked it, didn’t you. Liked that I couldn’t remember anything except for you. Liked that power.” He snorts, and it’s like a kick to the chest because damn him, he’s right. “You always were that kind of weak.”

Jack stalks into the living room and Jesse can tell just by his posture that it’s Soldier 76 he’s dealing with now, like there had been any doubt about it.

“Where are my things.” A demand, not a question.

Jesse points silently to the bag in the corner that has Jack’s boots next to it, his chest armor tossed haphazardly down and not put away from the other night. He looks away as Jack gets dressed - he doesn’t have the right to look at that any more. When he looks back, Soldier 76 is there in full uniform, except for the shattered mask he’s holding in one hand. The gun gets slung across his back, a casualness in the gesture that in a split second takes him miles away from the Jack that Jesse’s known over the past few months.

Without another word Jack marches out, back ramrod straight. A minute later Jesse hears his hovercycle starting up and zooming away. He doesn’t even care, Jack can take it. 

It’s after ten minutes of silence, when the birds start chirping again and the coffee pot shuts off the warm cycle that Jesse lets his head fall into his hands and take deep, shuddering breaths.

-x-x-x-x-x-

_ jack is back, probably on his way to you. not happy.  _

Jesse sends the message off to Ana, then promptly gets back into bed and doesn’t leave for two days. He’s not - mourning or anything, it’s not like he had a breakup. Somehow he still finds himself curling up around a bottle of bourbon every night, telling himself he should eat something and then not doing it. 

He drags himself into town once he realizes he doesn’t have any food that doesn’t require a great deal of preparation, damn you again, Jack. Gaby takes one look at him and pulls him to the back of the store, settling him down with a cup of hot cocoa and a plate full of buñuelos.

“Talk,” she says. “Talk and sugar are how to cure a broken heart.”

“I don’t -” he starts, but she stares him down until he hunches in his seat and nibbles at the fried dough. He has no idea how to summarize the clusterfuck his life has become so he haltingly says: “We used to know each other, fell out of touch. Reconnected. But - it uh, turns out his work wasn’t quite done with him, he got pulled back into it.”

Gaby frowns. “He seemed so happy to be retired, picking out all that wood and such. So excited about cooking, I gave him my sister’s concha recipe just last week.”

Jesse blinks rapidly, stares at the table. “Both of us, what we used to do - we had to be different people. And he decided to go back to it.” 

Bustling around, Gaby presses a motherly kiss to the top of Jesse’s head as she cleans up their cups. “He’ll be back, mijo. Boys that look at you like that one did don’t leave for long.” She sends him off with a bag full of food that she doesn’t let him pay for, telling him to eat a damn vegetable before he dies of scurvy.

Things slowly go back to normal - the normal before Jack, that is. 

Jesse stacks the wood for the bookshelves in the corner of the garage, puts his books back onto the rebuilt boards and bricks. He tells himself that it’s nice to not have to fight over the shower in the morning, nice to not have to spend money to feed two people, nice to choose what he eats for every meal instead of having food experiments or weird Midwestern potluck dishes forced on him.

It takes weeks for his bed to stop smelling like Jack, and Jesse doesn’t know how he feels about that.

He takes job after job, because if he’s working then he doesn’t have to think. He picks the ones that he knows are going to devolve into violence - Jesse wants to hurt something, someone, anyone, and if he can get paid for it then all the better.

Once, in the middle of the Namib desert, he sees Jack at a distance. He can’t tell if Jack sees him or not - his face is covered by a new visor and mask. Jesse’s fine until he sees Jack zoom away on Jesse’s hovercycle, at which point he’s full of blinding, white-hot rage.

His client is vaguely pleased at Jesse’s success and less vaguely alarmed that every guard in the building he sent Jesse to burgle is left dead in a pile in front of the front doors. 

Whatever, Jesse gets paid all the same.

After pulling a job in Suez, Jesse heads over to Cairo to see Ana because that’s what he always does when he’s in the area. He doesn’t expect her to open the door to him then stand in the doorway, glaring. 

“What did you do to him?” she asks, and he has no idea how to answer.

She can tell, so she lets him in. 

Ana developed a base like Jesse did, though hers always felt more like home to him than his own house did. At least, it used to. It’s small, cozy, decorated with little statues that she found or looted over the years. Jesse sits in one of the deceptively comfortable chairs by the small table, knowing that Ana will appear with a tray filled with tea things.

The scent of mint tea is soothing, and Jesse feels the muscles in his shoulders relaxing despite himself. That lasts until she sets her cup down with a clink of porcelain and asks bluntly, “What did you do?”

Jesse stares into the golden depths of his tea. “What I thought was the right thing.” When he finally looks up at Ana, she raises an eyebrow in encouragement.

“I just,” he gestures in the air, pulling it back just in time not to spill the tea. “Took him home. Kept him there. Let him do what he wanted, if it wasn’t out getting in trouble. Which meant fixin’ up my place and cooking and just…”

Jesse runs his hand through his hair, knowing it’s a tell and not caring. “He was  _ nice, _ Ana. Imagine Jack without all the fuckin’ trauma, without what Gabriel did to him, without...any of it. You don’t know -”

“I do, Jesse. Or did you forget about finding me in that hospital?”

He’s silent.

“I recovered, as I’m sure Jack will as well. But he’s - angry. Imagine what it’s like to feel like you were out of control of your own body, that this strange version of yourself developed a whole life without your input. Because that’s what it feels like. Would you be Jesse McCree without your history? Without what Deadlock, Blackwatch, everyone and everything you ever encountered affecting you?”

She pours more tea. “Some of Jack’s anger is misplaced, but not all. You developed a - relationship with a person that doesn’t exist. That  _ can’t _ exist, not in the world we live in. You kept him home for a reason, and that’s not fair.”

The tea sits like acid in Jesse’s stomach. “Thanks, Ana. Want to tell me more about how I’m a horrible person?”

She rolls her eyes, covers his hand with her own warm fingers for a moment. “You did the best you could, it had no ill intentions, I don’t think. Did you fuck him?”

Jesse sputters, chokes on his tea. Fails to come up with anything approaching words.

“That was a stupid move. Understandable, but stupid. Now you’re mooning over it like a breakup instead of just getting past a complicated situation like you could have.” 

“I didn’t mean to,” Jesse says, and doesn’t mean for it to sound as sad and exposed as it does.

“I know, dear. Just because it was good intentions doesn’t mean it was a mistake, though.” No one, least of all Jesse, ever called Ana Amari merciful. “Go home. Stop taking jobs for a while, people are talking about your body count and your bounty was up ten million the last I saw. Eat more, and less alcohol.”

“Anything else, commander?” he mutters sarcastically as he gets up. There’s a slap to his cheek, that turns into Ana holding his chin in place so he can’t look away from her. He always forgets that she’s only an inch or two shorter than he is.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she says, her single brown eye boring into his own. He waits to see if she’s going to say anything else, but she just kisses his forehead and shoves him none too gently towards the door. 

He stops in the doorway, turns and looks at Ana. “What would have happened if I’d taken you from the hospital like you’d asked me to, back then? If I hadn’t left you there?”

She looks at him and her whole posture is tired, so tired. “Go home, McCree.”

He goes.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jesse decides to treat the whole thing like a fever dream. Something that felt real, but then he woke up from. He uses a mental scalpel to neatly excise it from his brain, cutting away all the threads tying him to a version of a person that doesn’t exist.

Sometimes bits hold on, like when he opens the freezer and finds portions of chili and stew neatly labeled in Jack’s handwriting that he has to do  _ something _ with, because he can’t fit anything else in there. 

(He should throw them away.)

(He doesn’t.)

Jesse buys new sheets for the bed, a new throw for the couch, goes back to sorting through the books because that was something that was  _ his _ and Jack doesn’t get to ruin. It does take a while for him to stop looking at a book and wondering if Jack would like it, but he gets there eventually.

After a few months it’s like nothing ever happened. Or so Jesse tells himself. He does the occasional job, bums around his house, and tells himself that he would be doing this anyways whenever he waters the small garden in the back. 

He does some math, figures out when Jack planted everything. Beets and carrots, that’s what he said he’d put in. Jesse measures the stems - red and green and leafy, wonders if he should pull them or not. 

Once he does, the garden’s done. He knows that. It was Jack’s thing, and it’ll be gone.

Jesse is sitting on the couch with a glass of bourbon in hand, debating absent mindedly between finishing the book about the Iditarod he’s been reading and going and jacking off, when he hears a familiar electric whirr of a hovercycle. 

He doesn’t bother getting up, but then Jack doesn’t bother knocking.

“I installed that lock for a reason,” Jack says, expression hidden behind his mask.

“You put it in to protect your stuff and you’re not here, so stop bitching.”

They’re both silent for a moment, and Jesse has no idea what to do with the situation. Is Jack here to yell at him some more? Did he talk to Ana? Before he can work himself up more about it, Jack clears his throat. 

“I came to return the bike.”

“ - Okay,” Jesse says cautiously, after a long pause. “You have a way to get back to town?”

“No.”

Jesse suddenly feels very tired and not up to this back-and-forth. He scratches through his beard for a minute, before finally saying, “Sit down if you’re going to stay. And take off the fucking mask.”

It takes a minute but - Jack sits. Sits in the chair that he always said he hated because one of the bars on the back dug into his shoulderblades. He takes off the mask and even though his face is set in a furiously neutral expression, Jesse spent too much time with him, learned to read him. He can see the slight tension around Jack’s left eye that says he’s not comfortable.

“Just because you’re you again doesn’t mean you’re magically gonna like that chair,” Jesse says with false ease. 

Jack doesn’t say anything, but something in him - unbends slightly, like a thread that’s been cut. 

Jesse clears his throat. “Before you get into why you’re here I just wanted to clear the air and say - I’m sorry. You were right, for some of it, I kept you here and kept you around. But it wasn’t - I didn’t mean to be a dick about it. I just...didn’t think.” 

Jack’s body language is still rigid, arms laid out precisely along the arms of the chair. He looks around the room, cataloguing...Jesse doesn’t know what. Looking at the changes? Looking at it with the eyes of a man who spent years being wined and dined by the worlds’ most powerful? Jesse’s deep enough into his own thoughts that he almost misses when Jack starts to talk.

“I was - unfair to you.” Jesse blinks. Jack keeps glancing around the room, not meeting Jesse’s eyes. “You looked after me and kept me safe, when you had no obligation to do so. I...appreciate it.” 

He stands up, starts to walk towards the door. Jesse can’t help the sound of disbelief that he snorts out as he stands up and follows.

“That’s it? That’s it. You come all this way to say that? Jesus Christ, Jack.” 

Jack turns, looks at Jesse. He’s just a few feet away and Jesse is surprised at how much he wants to  _ touch, _ how much he wants to take those few steps and press a hand to Jack’s stubbly jaw. 

There are dark circles purpling the delicate flesh below Jack’s eyes, and Jesse’s brain is a few steps behind his mouth when he says quietly, “You look tired.”

Jack doesn’t immediately leave or punch him or do anything, really other than look Jesse in the eyes, finally, so Jesse keeps going. “If you’re ever in the area - you can always crash here. If you want.” 

The door shuts quietly behind Jack, and Jesse lets out a long breath. 

It could have gone worse.

-x-x-x-x-x-

It’s a month later when Jesse’s making a late dinner that he hears his door open. He turns, and somehow he’s not surprised to see Jack there, hand on the doorframe like he’s about to bolt. 

Jesse turns back to the stove, stirring the pot he’s got going. “Heatin’ up posole I threw some chorizo into. Don’t worry, Gaby made it so it won’t poison you.” He doesn’t turn around to look at what Jack might be doing, afraid that he might have gone right back out the door. When he goes to get a drink from the fridge, however, Jack is sitting there at the table.

His mask is set to the side, his jacket draped over the back of the chair, and he looks...exhausted. Something beyond physical, like maybe it was his emotions that got shot up instead of his body. Jesse leans back against the counter, drinking a beer that he doesn’t offer to Jack. “You need any fixin’ up?” he asks between sips.

Jack shakes his head. Jesse shrugs, gets out a couple of bowls from the cupboards. They eat the stew in silence, and the rice pudding that Jesse pulls out of the fridge after. Jack doesn’t move to help clean up or put away the dishes, just sits exhaustedly at the table, staring into space. 

Jesse stops in the doorway that leads to his bedroom.  _ His _ now, which he has to remind himself of because seeing Jack makes him automatically go for the sofa. “You know where everything is,” he tells Jack. “Help yourself.”

He waits a moment to see if Jack will react, and when he doesn’t he continues on back. He takes a shower, gets into bed, reads for a while before he stares at the ceiling in darkness.

There are no sounds from the rest of the house - he doesn’t know if Jack left or is crashing on the couch or what. Jesse wants to get up and check, but at the same time knows that he should let it be. He has a flashback to getting a stray dog to trust him as a child, and he falls asleep to memories of the bites he got before the dog believed he wouldn’t hurt her.

In the morning, there’s a quiet to the house that feels empty. 

Jesse gets up, and something in him relaxes when he finds the living room devoid of life. The throw blanket is folded up neatly on the couch, though, and there’s a half pot of coffee that’s still hot. The dishes from last night have been put away, and there’s a coffee mug in their place on the drying rack. It’s a heavy, stoneware thing that Jack always liked to use because he said it insulated better. 

Touching the water still drying on the clean mug, Jesse smiles.

-x-x-x-x-x-

That’s how it starts.

Jack stops by every once in awhile, Jesse can tell it’s always after something rough has gone down. The first few times he eats, sleeps, and is gone before Jesse gets up. Jesse talks while they eat, little nothings about how people in the town that Jack met are doing, a funny thing that happened on a job, a new book he read. Jack stays silent.

Once he comes in with a dislocated shoulder, which Jesse helps shove back into place. When he sits down to eat, Jesse whaps him in the head with a rolled up magazine. Jack at first looks shocked, then angry. Jesse ignores it, saying, “People who get fixed up and eat my food  _ talk _ at the dinner table, Jack.”

Reluctantly, almost grudgingly, Jack asks how the garden is doing. Jesse shrugs, says he doesn’t fuckin’ know, he can’t garden. 

The next morning when Jesse gets up, there’s a colander full of carrots and beets in the sink, perfect and plump and clean. Jesse eats one of the carrots right there - it’s sweet and crunchy, a little woody but…

It’s theirs.

The next time Jack stops by Jesse pulls frozen stew out to reheat. When Jack pokes at it dubiously, asking where he got the recipe, Jesse tells him that it’s made out of the vegetables from the garden. 

Jack eats slowly, spoon scraping the bowl when he’s done.

Late that evening, Jesse’s woken by the hall light turning on. Most of it is blocked by Jack’s body filling the doorway. Jesse squints, but all he can see is a black silhouette. 

“Come in or not but turn the fuckin’ light off,” he says before rolling over and falling back asleep. 

In the morning the other side of Jesse’s bed is empty, but there’s a familiar smell on the pillow and a dent in the mattress. Jesse rolls over into it and easily falls back asleep.

Like some kind of barrier was broken, Jack starts to talk after that. He tells Jesse that Los Muertos are gunning for him, that Talon is causing problems in Haiti. In turn Jesse tells him to keep his head down because Doomfist’s been seen in Central America, that Ana and Fareeha are talking again. 

It’s all surface level, though. Jack doesn’t talk about whatever mission he has that keeps driving him, Jesse doesn’t mention that he met Reaper on the battlefield and only escaped due to sheer luck. 

It’s after that last one that Jesse lays down his line in the sand. Jack follows Jesse down the hallway after they’ve put their empty bottles away, but Jesse stops and turns, an arm blocking the way.

“If you want to come to bed, then come to bed,” he says, meeting Jack’s eyes tiredly in the darkness. “But if not I need you to stay out here. I’m only human, Jack. I can’t take this back and forth shit that -”

Jack Morrison kisses differently than his memory-wiped self did. It makes sense - he has an extra half century of experience to draw on. Jesse spends a minute cataloguing the differences before he realizes that he just doesn’t care and pulls Jack close. 

Breaking off the kiss, Jack doesn’t move back. He rests his forehead against Jesse’s, so close they can’t look at each other but they can breathe the same humid air.

“I just -,” he starts to say in that gravelly voice of his, the words brushing against Jesse’s lips. “I needed - time.” 

“Okay,” Jesse says, and then “Okay” again as Jack pulls him back towards the bedroom.

People like Jack Morrison and Jesse McCree don’t get the happy endings. You get a happy ending when everything is wrapped up in a bow - when the war ends, when the king is crowned. That’s not the way the real world works, with wars that will never end because the world has changed too much, with kings that are only dictators with delusions of grandeur.

They don’t get happy endings but maybe, perhaps they can have - this. 

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thereweregiants)


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